Wiki-MetaSemantik: A Wikipedia-derived Query Expansion Approach based on Network Properties

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of Wikipedia for building semantic ontologies to do Query Expansion (QE) in order to improve the search results of search engines. In this technique, selecting related Wikipedia concepts becomes important. We propose the use of network properties (degree, closeness, and pageRank) to build an ontology graph of user query concepts which is derived directly from Wikipedia structures. The resulting expansion system is called Wiki-MetaSemantik. We tested this system against other online thesauruses and ontology based QE in both individual and meta-search engines setups. Despite that our system has to build a Wikipedia ontology graph in order to do its work, the technique turns out to work very fast (1:281) compared to another ontology QE baseline (Wikipedia Persian ontology QE). It has thus the potential to be utilized online. Furthermore, it shows significant improvement in accuracy. Wiki-MetaSemantik also shows better performance in a meta-search engine (MSE) set up rather than in an individual search engine set up.